Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, professionally known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. Eno was a student of Roy Ascott on his Groundcourse at Ipswich Civic College. He then studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex, England, taking inspiration from minimalist painting.… Read More

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"Hello, it''s me." Todd Rundgren can never escape that greeting and song title. Nor would he want to, I imagine. It''s a signature song for him, one that was transcendent for American radio.
Between that 1973 "Midnight Special" performance and the show I covered a few months back at BB King''s NYC, Rundgren has traveled a long, winding road well and with grace.
His bands, Nazz and Utopia with his eponymous, "Todd Rundgren" band and solo career displayed his talents as a mus...

' Note: If you like what you hear, check out our “Best Music Interludes” playlist on Spotify, curated by our technical director John Perotti. Spotify is free to use but requires a login.
Brian Eno, “Untitled”
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oOoOO, “Stay Home”
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' Melody GardotJazz chanteuse and songwriter Melody Gardot''s clarity and reserve is something to take in. Born in New Jersey in 1985 and raised in Philadelphia, she tracked her path of music starting at the age of 9. Piano and fashion studies were interrupted at 19, as Gardot was hit by a car whilst riding her bicycle, and left for dead on the side of the road. During the arduous months of recovery, music became her healer and her third hand. The injurious trauma left her s...

'We wish YouTube commenters could be this refined when they''re getting raunchy with one another. YouTube comedy channel Dead Parrot is back with its third installment in the glorious web series "YouTube Comment Reconstruction," this time featuring a re-enactment of users discussing the ethereal song “An Ending (Ascent)” by Brian Eno.
The short black-and-white film opens on seasoned British actors Grahame Edwards and Eryl Lloyd Parry, both dressed to the...

Timeline

Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Brian Eno.

CHILDHOOD

1948Birth
Brian Eno was born in 1948 at Phyllis Memorial Hospital, Woodbridge, Suffolk, the son of Catholic parents William Eno, who had followed his father and grandfather into the postal service, and Maria Eno (née Buslot), a Belgian-born woman whom William had met during his World War II service.
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The unusual surname Eno, long established in Suffolk, derives from the French Huguenot surname Hennot. Maria had already had a daughter (Brian's half-sister Rita), and together William and Maria would have two further children, Arlette and Roger. Read Less

TWENTIES

196921 Years Old
Eno was educated at St Joseph's College, Ipswich, which was founded by the St John le Baptiste de la Salle order of Catholic brothers (from whom he took part of his name when a student there), at Ipswich Art School in Roy Ascott's Groundcourse and the Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1969.
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At the Winchester School of Art, Eno attended a lecture by Pete Townshend of The Who about the use of tape machines by non-musicians, citing the lecture as the moment he realised he could make music even though he was not a musician at that point. In school, he used a tape recorder as a musical instrument and experimented with his first, sometimes improvisational, bands. St. Joseph's College teacher and painter Tom Phillips encouraged him, recalling "Piano Tennis" with Eno, in which, after collecting pianos, they stripped and aligned them in a hall, striking them with tennis balls. From that collaboration, he became involved in Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. The first released recording in which Eno played is the Deutsche Grammophon edition of Cardew's The Great Learning (rec. Feb. 1971), as one of the voices in the recital of The Great Learning Paragraph 7. Another early recording was the Berlin Horse soundtrack, by Malcom Le Grice, a nine-minute, 2 × 16 mm-double-projection, released in 1970 and presented in 1971. Read Less

In 1972, Eno and Robert Fripp (from King Crimson) used a tape-delay system, described as 'Frippertronics', and the pair released an album in 1973 called (No Pussyfooting).
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The technique involved two Revox tape recorders set up side by side, with the tape unspooling from the first deck being carried over to the second deck to be spooled. This enabled sound recorded on the first deck to be played back by the second deck at a time delay that varied with the distance between the two decks and the speed of the tape (typically a few seconds). The technique was borrowed from minimalist composer Terry Riley, whose similar tape-delay feedback system with a pair of Revox tape recorders (a setup Riley used to call the "Time Lag Accumulator") was first used on Riley's album Music for The Gift in 1963. In 1975, Fripp and Eno released a second album, Evening Star, and played several live shows in Europe. Read Less

Eno was a prominent member of the performance art-classical orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia – having started playing with them in 1972.

197325 Years Old
In 1973 he produced the orchestra's first album The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics (released in March 1974) and in 1974 he produced the live album Hallellujah!
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The Portsmouth Sinfonia Live at the Royal Albert Hall of their infamous May 1974 concert (released in October 1974.) In addition to producing both albums, Eno performed in the orchestra on both recordings – playing the clarinet. Eno also deployed the orchestra's famously dissonant string section on his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). The orchestra at this time included other musicians whose solo work he would subsequently release on his Obscure label including Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. That year he also composed music for the album Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy, with Kevin Ayers, to accompany the poet June Campbell Cramer.<br /><br /> Eno continued his career by producing a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely credited with coining the term "ambient music", low-volume music designed to modify one's perception of a surrounding environment. Read Less

His first such work, 1975's Discreet Music (again created via an elaborate tape-delay methodology, which Eno diagrammed on the back cover of the LP), is considered the landmark album of the genre.
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This was followed by his Ambient series (Music for Airports (Ambient 1), The Plateaux of Mirror (Ambient 2), Day of Radiance (Ambient 3) and On Land (Ambient 4)). Eno was the primary musician on these releases with the exception of Ambient 2 which featured Harold Budd on keyboard, and Ambient 3 where the American composer Laraaji was the sole musician playing the zither and hammered dulcimer with Eno producing. Read Less

In 1975 Eno performed as the Wolf in a rock version of Sergei Prokofiev's classic Peter and the Wolf.
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Also in 1975, Eno provided synthesisers and treatments on Quiet Sun's Mainstream album alongside Phil Manzanera, Charles Hayward, Dave Jarrett, and Bill MacCormick, and he performed on and contributed songs and vocals to Phil Manzanera's Diamond Head album.

THIRTIES

In 1980 Eno provided a film score for Herbert Vesely's Egon Schiele – Exzess und Bestrafung, also known as Egon Schiele – Excess and Punishment.
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The ambient-style score was an unusual choice for a historical piece, but it worked effectively with the film's themes of sexual obsession and death.<br /><br /> In 1981 having returned from Ghana and before On Land, he discovered Miles Davis' 1974 track "He Loved Him Madly", a melancholy tribute to Duke Ellington influenced by both African music and Karlheinz Stockhausen: as Eno stated in the liner notes for On Land, "Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the "spacious" quality I was after, and like Federico Fellini's 1973 film Amarcord, it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently." Read Less

In 1980–1981 Eno collaborated with David Byrne of Talking Heads (which he had already anagrammatised as 'King's Lead Hat') on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was built around radio broadcasts Eno collected while living in the United States, along with sampling recordings from around the world transposed over music predominantly inspired by African and Middle Eastern rhythms.

198335 Years Old
In 1983 Eno collaborated with his brother, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois on the album "APOLLO: Atmospheres and Soundtracks".
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Many of the sounds created on this album can be heard again on later albums produced by both Eno and Lanois. Tracks from the album are also used as part of the musical score for the Al Reinert film, For All Mankind. Read Less

FORTIES

In 1992 Eno released an album featuring heavily syncopated rhythms entitled Nerve Net, with contributions from several former collaborators including Robert Fripp, Benmont Tench, Robert Quine and John Paul Jones.

This album was a last-minute substitution for My Squelchy Life, which featured more pop oriented material, with Eno on vocals. (Several tracks from My Squelchy Life later appeared on 1993's retrospective box set Eno Box II: Vocals, and the entire album was eventually released in 2014 as part of an expanded rerelease of Nerve Net'.) Eno also released in 1992 a work entitled The Shutov Assembly, recorded between 1985 and 1990.
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This album embraces atonality and abandons most conventional concepts of modes, scales and pitch. Much of the music shifts gradually and without discernible focus, and is one of Eno's most varied ambient collections. Conventional instrumentation is eschewed, save for treated keyboards.<br /><br /> During the 1990s Eno became increasingly interested in self-generating musical systems, the results of which he called generative music. The basic premise of generative music is the blending of several independent musical tracks, of varying sounds, length, and in some cases, silence. When each individual track concludes, it starts again mixing with the other tracks allowing the listener to hear an almost infinite combination. In one instance of generative music, Eno calculated that it would take almost 10,000 years to hear the entire possibilities of one individual piece. Eno has presented this music in his own, and other artists', art and sound installations, most notably "I Dormienti (The Sleepers)", Lightness: Music for the Marble Palace, Music for Civic Recovery Centre, The Quiet Room and "Music for Prague". Read Less

Eno co-produced The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991), and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) for U2 with his frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, and produced 1993's Zooropa with Mark "Flood" Ellis. In 1995, U2 and Eno joined forces to create the album Original Soundtracks 1 under the group name Passengers; songs from OST1 included "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo". When the album was released, the US charts were dominated by movie soundtrack albums and singles. Even though films are listed for each song, all but three are bogus. Once Eno pointed out that it was not a real ploy for radio airplay, but a spoof of one, U2 agreed to the concept. Eno also produced Laid (1993), Wah Wah (1994) Millionaires (1999) and Pleased to Meet You (2001) for James, performing as an extra musician on all four. He is credited for "frequent interference and occasional co-production" on their 1997 album Whiplash. <br /><br />Eno played on the 1986 album Measure for Measure by Australian band Icehouse. He remixed two tracks for Depeche Mode, "I Feel You" and "In Your Room", both single releases from the album Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993. Read Less

In 1995, Eno provided one of several remixes of "Protection" by Massive Attack (originally from their Protection album) for release as a single.
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The single also included more remixes by DJs J-Swift, Tom D, and Underdog.<br /><br /> In 2007, he produced the fourth studio album by Coldplay entitled Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, which was released in 2008. Also in 2008, he worked with Grace Jones on her album Hurricane, credited for "production consultation" and as a member of the band, playing keyboards, treatments and background vocals. He worked on the twelfth studio album by U2, again with Lanois, titled No Line on the Horizon. It was recorded in Morocco, South France and Dublin and released in Europe on 27 February 2009. Read Less

One of Eno's better-known collaborations was with the members of U2, Luciano Pavarotti and several other artists in a group called Passengers. They produced the 1995 album "Original Soundtracks 1". This album reached No. 76 on the US Billboard charts and No. 12 in the UK charts. It featured a single, "Miss Sarajevo", which was a top 10 hit in the UK (#6). Read Less

This collaboration is chronicled in Eno's book A Year with Swollen Appendices a diary published in 1996.

In 1996 Eno scored the six-part fantasy television series Neverwhere.

FIFTIES

200456 Years Old
In 2004 Fripp and Eno recorded another ambient collaboration album, The Equatorial Stars.

200557 Years Old
Eno returned in June 2005 with Another Day on Earth, his first major album since Wrong Way Up (with John Cale) to prominently feature vocals (a trend continued with Everything That Happens Will Happen Today).
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The album differs from his 1970s solo work as musical production has changed since then, evident in its semi-electronic production. Read Less

In early 2006 Eno collaborated with David Byrne, again, for the reissue of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in celebration of the influential album's 25th anniversary.
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Eight previously unreleased tracks, recorded during the initial sessions in 1980/81, were added to the album, while one track, "Qu'ran", was removed in accordance with a strongly worded complaint from an Islamic organisation in London. An unusual interactive marketing strategy coincided with its re-release, the album's promotional website features the ability for anyone to officially and legally download the multi-tracks of two songs from the album, "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody". Individuals can then remix and upload new mixes of these tracks to the website so others can listen to and rate them. Read Less

In late 2006 Eno released 77 Million Paintings, a program of generative video and music specifically for the PC.
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As its title suggests, there is a possible combination of 77 million paintings where the viewer will see different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched. Likewise, the accompanying music is generated by the program so that it's almost certain the listener will never quite hear the same arrangement twice. The second edition of "77 Million Paintings" featuring improved morphing and a further two layers of sound was released on 14 January 2008. In June 2007, when commissioned in the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco, California, Annabeth Robinson (AngryBeth Shortbread) recreated 77 Million Paintings in Second Life. Read Less

In 2007 Eno's music was featured in a movie adaption of Irvine Welsh's best-selling collection Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance.
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He also appeared playing keyboards in Voila, Belinda Carlisle's solo album sung entirely in French. Read Less

Also in 2007, Eno contributed a composition titled "Grafton Street" to Dido's third album, Safe Trip Home, released in November 2008.

In December 2007, the newly elected leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, appointed Eno – then aged 59 – as his youth affairs adviser.
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In 2006, Eno was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions and in January 2009 he spoke out against Israel's military action on the Gaza Strip by writing an opinion for CounterPunch and participating in a large-scale protest in London. Read Less

LATE ADULTHOOD

200860 Years Old
In 2008, he released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today with David Byrne, designed the sound for the video game Spore and wrote a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a.
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Eno revealed on radio in May 2009 that a skin graft he received as treatment for a severe burn on his arm was part human skin, part carbon fibre.
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He explained that as human skin is based on carbon, the experimental treatment was likely going to work out well for him, in spite of the fact that he feels a lightness in the affected arm. Read Less

In June 2009 Eno curated the Luminous Festival at Sydney Opera House, culminating in his first live appearance in many years. "Pure Scenius" consisted of three live improvised performances on the same day, featuring Eno, Australian improvisation trio The Necks, Karl Hyde from Underworld, electronic artist Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams.

Eno scored the music for Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lovely Bones, released in December 2009.

201062 Years Old
Eno released another solo album on Warp Records in late 2010.
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Small Craft on a Milk Sea, made in association with long-time collaborator Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, was released on 2 November in the United States and 15 November in the UK. The album included five compositions as adaptions of those tracks that Eno wrote for The Lovely Bones. Read Less

Eno also sang backing vocals on Anna Calvi's debut album on two songs "Desire" and "Suzanne & I". He later released Drums Between the Bells, a collaboration with poet Rick Holland, on 4 July 2011.
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In November 2012, Eno released Lux, a 76-minute composition in four sections, via Warp Records.<br /><br /> Eno worked with French–Algerian Raï singer Rachid Taha on Taha's Tékitoi (2004) and Zoom (2013) albums, contributing percussion, bass, brass and vocals. Eno also performed with Taha at the Stop the War concert in London in 2005. Read Less

In 2011, Eno and Coldplay reunited and Eno contributed "enoxification" and additional composition on Coldplay's fifth studio album Mylo Xyloto, released on 24 October of that year.
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In 1994, Microsoft corporation designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, "The Microsoft Sound". In an interview with Joel Selvin in the San Francisco Chronicle he said: <br /><br /> Eno shed further light on the composition of the sound on the BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, admitting that he created it using a Macintosh computer, and stating "I wrote it on a Mac. I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them."<br /><br /> Eno had spoken of an early and ongoing interest in playing with light in a similar way to the ambient manner in which he manipulated sound, but only started experimenting with the medium of video in 1978. Eno describes the first video camera he received, which would become his main tool for creating ambient video and light installations: Read Less

While not the only inventor of ambient music, Eno is seen as a major contributor to the genre. The Ambient Music Guide argues that he has brought from "relative obscurity into the popular consciousness" fundamental ideas about ambient music, including "the idea of modern music as subtle atmosphere, as chill-out, as impressionistic, as something that creates space for quiet reflection or relaxation." His groundbreaking work in electronic music has been said to have brought widespread attention to and innovations in the role of electronic technology in recording. <br /><br />"I've often eulogised Eno's musical abilities," remarked Rick Wright of Pink Floyd, "but alongside his talent he's also a very nice guy. Sickening, isn't it?" <br /><br />Both Half Man Half Biscuit (in the song "Eno Collaboration" on the EP of the same name) and MGMT have written songs about Eno. The band LCD Soundsystem has frequently cited Eno as a key influence on their own sound and music. Read Less

In 2011 Belgian academics from the Royal Museum for Central Africa named a species of Afrotropical spider Pseudocorinna brianeno in his honour.
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Brian Eno refers to himself as an "Evangelical Atheist".<br /><br /> In 1996, Eno and others started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public about the very long-term future of society. He is also a columnist for the British newspaper The Observer.<br /><br /> The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition mobile phone features exclusive music composed by Eno. Between 8 January 2007 and 12 February 2007, ten units of Nokia 8800 Sirocco Brian Eno Signature Edition mobile phones, individually numbered and engraved with Eno's signature were auctioned off. All proceeds went to two charities chosen by Eno: the Keiskamma Aids treatment program and The World Land Trust. Read Less

Eno started the Obscure Records label in Britain in 1975 to release works by lesser-known composers. The first group of three releases included his own composition, Discreet Music, and the now-famous The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) by Gavin Bryars. The second side of Discreet Music consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition which Eno had previously chosen to precede Roxy Music's appearances on stage, to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognisable. Side one consisted of a tape loop system for generating music from relatively sparse input. These tapes had previously been used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with Fripp, most notably on Evening Star. Only 10 albums were released on Obscure, including works by John Adams, Michael Nyman, and John Cage. At this time Eno was also affiliating with artists in the Fluxus movement. <br /><br />Eno has also been active in other artistic fields. In March 2008 Eno collaborated with the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino on a show of the latter's works with Eno's soundscapes at Ara Pacis in Rome. In 2008, Eno designed the procedurally-generated music for the video game Spore. In October 2008, Eno collaborated with Peter Chilvers to create an application titled Bloom, Trope, and Air for the iOS platform. Read Less

In 2013, Brian Eno made a number of limited edition prints featuring the artwork from his 2012 album Lux available only from his website.
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Eno appeared as Father Brian Eno at the "It's Great Being a Priest!" convention, in "Going to America", the final episode of the television sitcom Father Ted, which originally aired on 1 May 1998 on Channel 4.<br /><br /> Eno is frequently referred to as one of popular music's most influential artists. Critic Jason Ankeny at Allmusic argues that Eno "forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence." He has spread his techniques and theories primarily through his production; his distinctive style affected a number of projects he's been involved in, including Bowie's Berlin Trilogy (helping to popularise minimalism) and the albums he produced for Talking Heads (incorporating African music and polyrhythms on Eno's advice), Devo, and other groups. Eno's first collaboration with David Byrne, 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, pioneered sampling techniques that would prove to be influential in hip-hop, and broke ground by incorporating world music. Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies have been used by many bands, and Eno's production style has proven influential in several general respects: "his recording techniques have helped change the way that modern musicians – particularly electronic musicians – view the studio. No longer is it just a passive medium through which they communicate their ideas but itself a new instrument with seemingly endless possibilities." Read Less

In 2013, Eno became a patron of Videre Est Credere (Latin for "to see is to believe") a UK human rights charity.
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Videre describes itself as "giveing local activists the equipment, training and support needed to safely capture compelling video evidence of human rights violations. This captured footage is verified, analysed and then distributed to those who can create change." He participates alongside movie producers Uri Fruchtmann and Terry Gilliam – along with executive director of Greenpeace UK John Sauven.<br /><br /> Solo studio albums <br /><br /> Ambient installation albums Read Less

In May 2014, Eno and Underworld's Karl Hyde released Someday World, featuring various guest musicians: from Coldplay's Will Champion and Roxy Music's Andy Mackay to newer names such as 22 year old Fred Gibson, who helped produce the record with Eno.
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Within weeks of the release, a second full length was announced titled High Life, which was released on 30 June 2014.<br /><br /> From the beginning of his solo career in 1973, Eno was in demand as a producer – though his management now describe him as a "sonic landscaper" rather than a producer. The first album with Eno credited as producer was Lucky Leif and the Longships by Robert Calvert. Eno's lengthy string of producer credits includes albums for Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Ultravox and James. He also produced part of the 1993 album When I Was a Boy by Jane Siberry. He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT Awards.<br /><br /> Eno describes himself as a "non-musician" and coined the term "treatments" to describe his modification of the sound of musical instruments, and to separate his role from that of the traditional instrumentalist. His skill at using "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" (the title of an essay by Eno) led in part to his career as a producer. His methods were recognised at the time (mid-1970s) as unique, so much so that on Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he is credited with 'Enossification'; on Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard with a Direct inject anti-jazz raygun and on John Cale's Island albums as simply being "Eno". Read Less

In 2014, Eno again protested publicly against what he called a "one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing" and a "war with no moral justification," in reference to the 2014 military operation of Israel into Gaza.
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He was also a co-signatory, along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker and others, to a letter published in The Guardian that labelled the conflict as an "inhumane and illegal act of military aggression" and called for "a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid." Read Less